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Douglas Hofstadter has a new book
- dsr_ 14y agoJuly 1994: Amazon.com sells first book, "Fluid Concepts & Creative Analogies: Computer Models of the Fundamental Mechanisms of Thought" -- at http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=176060&p=irol-corporateTimeline http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=176060&p=iro... That's pretty cool right there.
- pbw 14y agoJuly 1995... the years are above the months.
- raldi 14y agoI don't mean this in a rude way; I'm just confused: How is your comment at all relevant to this submission? Also, why are the dates all out of order?
- unwind 14y agoThe first book sold was written by the same author the submission is about. The Wikipedia entry on the professor also mentions this fact from the Amazon history (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Hofstadter#In_popular_culture http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Hofstadter#In_popular_c...).
- gwern 14y agoSounds like he's getting back to his research; which is good, since maybe it won't be as maudlin and self-indulgent as _I Am A Strange Loop_ was.
- craig552uk 14y agoI wasn't a fan of 'Strange Loop' either. I'll be buying this one though.
- zwischenzug 14y agoGlad to hear I wasn't the only one disappointed by it.
- Vivtek 14y agoHis wife fell to the floor one day with a previously unsuspected brain tumor while they were on sabbatical in Italy and died days later; Doug was left to raise their two children alone. I was always amazed he functioned at all, honestly. I can't tell you how happy I am that he's back to research.
- themgt 14y agoThe idea that analogy underpins all thought is also argued by Ian McGilchrist in his book Master and His Emissary, which I'd highly recommend to people interested in the sort of epic philosophical undertaking GEB was: http://www.iainmcgilchrist.com/The_Master_and_his_Emissary_by_McGilchrist.pdf http://www.iainmcgilchrist.com/The_Master_and_his_Emissary_b...
- Jun8 14y agoGreat news! Even when it's overwrought and opinionated, Hofstadter's writing is never boring, Le Ton Beau de Marot is, I think, one of the best books on translation. There isn't too much (English) information on Emmanuel Sander (other than his homepage: http://paragraphe.crac.free.fr/articles.php?lng=en&pg=79 http://paragraphe.crac.free.fr/articles.php?lng=en&pg=79, Google seriously needs a semantic clustering algorithm for results, btw, had to laboriously sift through results for Emmanuel Sanders). Looking at the excerpt at Amazon, I learned that (i) Hofstadter married again (see them dancing here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeB-wu7aV0w http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeB-wu7aV0w) recently, which is totally irrelevant to the book, but was interesting to me since I was much moved from his heartfelt sorrow after his wife's death so eloquently expressed in Le Ton beau and (ii) there's a figure of speech called zeugma that I've never heard before (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeugma http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeugma), mentioned on pg. 5.
- scrame 14y ago"I am a Strange Loop" had quite a bit of fixation on his wife's death as well, I'm glad to hear he has re-married.
- chubot 14y agoHm, so back in 2000 I met a girl at Stanford whose senior thesis was based on the idea that metaphor is the core of all thought. I remember giving the counterexample of a mathematical formula. In what way is e^i*pi = -1 a metaphor for anything? What role does analogy play in this idea? Looking back, I am open to the fact that mathematicians use analogy to come up with their ideas (but perhaps not metaphor, which seems essentially literary) Mathematics is funny because it is presented in "reverse", i.e. not the way it was derived. Anyway I will have to read it, although I am slightly skeptical of ideas that try to explain "everything". In retrospect Taleb's Antifragile had some of that flavor, although I thought it was very good. EDIT: I think it's probably accurate to say that the brain is fundamentally an association machine. Analogies are a form of association, but not all associations are analogies. This very post is a great example of an association (not an analogy), because when I read "analogy is the core of all thought" it made me think of the disputed "metaphor is the core of all thought" idea I heard a long time ago.
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- jimhefferon 14y ago> e^i*pi = -1 Gee, I think that extending the power series for e^x to the complex domain is a pretty fair interpretation of `metaphor' in the context.
- chubot 14y agoLike a lot of philosophical debates, this comes down to semantics. I don't think there's any useful way in which Euler's identity is a 'metaphor' for anything. Metaphor has a fairly specific definition; it is a type of analogy. An analogy is a type of association. As mentioned, I think it's fair to say that all thought is based on associations. But it isn't true that all thought is analogies or metaphors. There are simply other types of associations. I would call this case a "generalization", an extremely common thought process in mathematics, and an example of a kind of analogy (not a metaphor) where the original domain is a proper subset the new one. In other words, applying an idea from one domain to another is an analogy, not necessarily a metaphor. To claim otherwise is just being loose with words in a way that has no meaning.
- dribnet 14y agoA great read by Hofstadter on Analogy as the Core of Cognition is here: http://prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/hofstadter/analogy.html http://prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/hofstadter/analogy.h... I'm a big fan of Hofstadter and his emphasis on analogy. George Lakoff has and others from cognative semantics provide strongly supporting views from linguistics. And in Machine Learning, Deep Learning is now providing new support for these views on analogy. This isn't immediately obvious until realizing that analogy is not necessarily an active process more likely a passive result of how thoughts and memories are encoded and stored. I'm curious as to whether Hofstadter will address this in this book - I would imagine so as he was long ago excited by earlier similar ML approaches (Sparse Distributed Memory).
- burgreblast 14y ago>Analogy is the core of all thinking. Explains why great pitches are stories.
- devindotcom 14y agoHow interesting - I've been leaving GEB on the coffee table in hopes that I might pick it up and start it again (made it halfway about 10 years ago) but now I wonder whether I ought to pick this up. Thanks for letting us know.
- rhizome 14y agoGEB is the most popular book nobody has read.
- tspiteri 14y agoI think it just doesn't work for everyone. While many people seem to love it, I failed to read it, twice. I think I got his point about self-reference and conciousness in the introduction, but from then on I found it so mind-numbingly boring I just couldn't continue reading past a couple of chapters. To me it seemed like he was going round and round re-explaining the same points over and over. In fact I thought reading GEB must be a hazing exercise for geeks. But then, since lots of people do seem to enjoy it, I guess it might just be one of those love-it-or-hate-it things.
- Evbn 14y agoThe longer ago you've read it, the more you like. Like so many nostalgic things.
- hp50g 14y agoAgreed. It seems disjoint and mostly hot air recycled over and over. Its not just you: there are a lot of us. My copy has done the rounds in the office and the conclusion is the same universally. If the content was concise or written in the style of say Persig, Neal Stevenson or Ray Bradbury, I could stomach it. Then again even worse is Ray Kurzweil who manages to do a GEB with far less content and that content is dubious and contrived rubbish.
- anigbrowl 14y agoThose simplistic-seeming explanations are subtly different, which turns out to be quite helpful when dealing with the conceptual difficulties of TNT. Of course, some more accessible language than TNT would make the book more approachable, but Hofstadter's objective is to demonstrate why you will not be able to circumvent the incompleteness theorem by adding syntactic sugar.
- dirtyaura 14y agoAn interesting subject. Elon Musk has been saying that it's important to reason from first principles and not by analogy. A lot of reasoning in startup world seems to be by analogy - the epitome being "AirBnB for Cars" type of elevator pitches.
- Evbn 14y agoAnalogy is inspiration, not proof.
- rsync 14y agoSomewhere in this comment, and in the first principles vs. analogy dichotomy, is the dichotomy showcased in the book/film "Moneyball". Something has always bothered me about it. Something like ... is it better for a human to make a wrong decision than it is for a machine to make a right one ? Perhaps "it depends" ? If so, what is the threshold ? How wrong does a human decision have to be to be inferior to a machine decision ? The same thing is showing up in Talebs _Antifragile_ ... he argues quite clearly for analogy, and skewers decision making from first principles. It troubles me somehow...
- erikpukinskis 14y agoI was just watching a talk by him where he clearly says that it's impossible to do this all the time, that you would go insane without using analogical thinking all day. But that it's a useful exercise when you are trying to sit down and find an innovative solution to a problem.
- zwischenzug 14y agoI wrote to DH around 2000 after a discussion I had with a friend about Wittgenstein and GEB. It was a pretty callow email, but he was kind enough to send a thoughtful reply. He said he didn't know much about Wittg., but didn't like his vagueness, which I found interesting from someone who was into Zen.
- teeja 14y agoI'd suggest that the difference is that Zen (at least in some schools) is after a meta-cognitive experience (by definition inexpressible in concrete terms) which transcends (even short circuits) cognition - whereas the aim of Western philosophy (at least in some schools) is a description of experience in concrete terms accessible to the intellect. I oversimplify, of course. But the extent to which Hofstadter is "into" Zen is open to question. (I don't remember much Zen in GEB.)
- zwischenzug 14y agoPrecisely. Wittgenstein was (in approach at least) a reaction against Western philosophy, and his "vagueness" was a consequence of that.
- lhnz 14y agoI agree with the premise that analogy is the core of all thinking, but the idea isn't new, at the very least I can trace it back to Julian Jaynes' 1976 book "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind" and it's highly probable other's have thought this through even before then.